quigonejinn

The Medley of Élan Vital by sidhefaer.

Astounding goodness, people. Tony and the making of Jarvis. It's mostly dialogue, which tells you how good it is if I not only got all the way through it, but adored it and have read it over and over and over and over again. Plus, the characterization of Tony. Plus, the characterization. Plus, the writing. Spare and precise as something really, really spare and precise.

The next morning, Rhodey leaves, and Tony tells Jarvis all about hangovers.

Pools, part 1, by anvil_of_wrong.

I mean, I can't even. I supposedly had something to do with this in that I suggested the basic narrative structure to montana_crows about tracing Tony's life through various stages of fuck-upedry by doing a series of short bits about pools. This is the one about Tony being a kid and Obie and Howard and the family house in the Adirondacks. It starts out easy enough, right? But then anvil_of_wrong just takes it and runs and forges not just wrong out of it, but something so goddamn right in the sparest, most precise and insightful language you can ever possibly imagine and, as a bonus, there is anvil_of_wrong's trademark ability to mix in history geekery, so that as you're reading, your mind just boggles at how she can know these things and fit them together so well. Also, the characterization.

"Yeah, it's nice. Howard won it at Los Alamos or something. A bet with one of the guys."

As usual: WHY ARE YOU STILL READING THIS POST. GO READ.

Daghlian had died after twenty-one days of agony the year before, fucking with the same piece of plutonium, and Slotin had spent days at his bedside, Howard remembers. More than the rest of them.

They'd called it the Demon Core after that. Blew it up in the Marshall Islands less than two months later.

anvil_of_wrong